Anachrony

"Building on the work of Aby Warburg (1866–1929), Didi-Huberman puts forth the idea that works of art are temporal knots, a mixture of past and present; they reveal what persists or “survives” (Nachleben) from earlier periods, in the form of a symptom in the current era. To gain access to these stratified temporalities, he writes, requires a “shock, a tearing of the veil, an irruption or appearance of time, what Proust and Benjamin have described so eloquently under the category of ‘involuntary memory’.” (...) what I call a dialectical contemporary seeks to navigate multiple temporalities within a more political horizon. Rather than simply claim that many or all times are present in each historical object, we need to ask why certain temporalities appear in particular works of art at specific historical moments. Furthermore, this analysis is motivated by a desire to understand our present condition and how to change it.

Lest this method be interpreted as yet another form of presentism, a preoccupation with the now masquerading as historical inquiry, it should be stressed that sightlines are always focused on the future: the ultimate aim is to disrupt the relativist pluralism of the current moment, in which all styles and beliefs are considered equally valid, and to move towards a more sharply politicized understanding of where we can and should be heading. If, as Osborne claims, the global contemporary is a shared fiction, then this doesn’t denote its ‘impossibility’, but rather provides the basis for a new political imaginary." Works of art are temporal knots, a mixture of past and present; they reveal what persists or “survives” (Nachleben) from earlier periods, in the form of a symptom in the current era. To gain access to these stratified temporalities requires a “shock, a tearing of the veil, an irruption or appearance of time. The followinf text from Cailre bishop "Radical Museology" refers to the way in which anachrony trackles the notions of contemporaneity specially as buult from contemporary museum practices. "Other theorists have claimed the contemporary as a question of temporal disjunction. Giorgio Agamben, for example, posits it as a state of being founded on temporal rupture: “contemporariness,” he writes, “is that relationship with time that adheres to it through a disjunction and an anachronism,” and it is only by this untimeliness or “dyschrony” that one can truly gaze at one’s own era.

He evocatively describes contemporariness as being able “to fix your gaze on the darkness of the epoch” and “being on time for an appointment that one cannot but miss.”17 Anachronism also permeates the reading of Terry Smith, one of the few art historians to tackle this question. He has persuasively argued that the contemporary should be set equally against the discourses of modernism and postmodernism, because it is characterized by antinomies and asynchronies: the simultaneous and incompatible co-existence of different modernities and ongoing social inequities, differences that persist despite the global spread of telecommunications systems and the purported universality of market logic. These discursive approaches seem to fall into one of two camps: either contemporaneity denotes stasis (i.e., it is a continuation of postmodernism’s post-historical deadlock) or it reflects a break with postmodernism by asserting a plural and disjunctive relationship to temporality. The latter is of course more generative, as it allows us to move away from both the historicity of modernism, characterized by an abandonment of tradition and a forward propulsion towards the new, and the historicity of postmodernism, equated with a ‘schizophrenic’ collapse of past and future into an expanded present.19 Certainly, an assertion of multiple, overlapping temporalities can be seen in many works of art since the mid-1990s by artists from countries struggling to deal with a context of recent war and political upheaval, especially in Eastern Europe and the Middle East.

Art historian Christine Ross has argued that contemporary artists look backwards in order to “presentify” the modernist regime of historicity and thereby to critique its futurity; artists are less interested in Walter Benjamin’s approach to history as radical discontinuity, she writes, than in “potential[izing] remains as forms of resistance to and redeployment of modern life.”21 However, other critics have questioned whether these artistic efforts are ultimately more nostalgic and retrospective than prospective: Dieter Roelstraete has lambasted contemporary art’s turn towards history-telling and historicizing for its “inability to grasp or even look at the present, much less to excavate the future.”A less contested approach to disjunctive temporalities can be found in the revival of interest in anachronism among art historians. Its central advocate, Georges Didi-Huberman, has argued that anachronism is so pervasive an operation in art throughout history that we should see its presence in all works: “in each historical object, all times encounter one another, collide, or base themselves plastically on one another, bifurcate, or even become entangled with each other.” Building on the work of Aby Warburg (1866–1929), Didi-Huberman puts forth the idea that works of art are temporal knots, a mixture of past and present; they reveal what persists or “survives” (Nachleben) from earlier periods, in the form of a symptom in the current era. To gain access to these stratified temporalities, he writes, requires a “shock, a tearing of the veil, an irruption or appearance of time, what Proust and Benjamin have described so eloquently under the category of ‘involuntary memory’.”

Taking their lead from Didi-Huberman, "Alexander Nagel and Christopher Wood demonstrate in Anachronic Renaissance (2010) the co-existence of two temporalities in works of art circa 1500, as culture shifted from religious Medieval to secular Renaissance. Arguing against the historicist idea that each object or event belongs in a specific time and place (the idea upon which anachronism is founded), they instead propose the term ‘anachronic’ to describe the way in which works of art perform a recursive temporality.25Nagel and Wood’s investigation, while compelling, is mono-directional: by their own admission, they “reverse engineer” from the work of art backwards (into its own past, its own chronotopology), rather than beginning with a diagnosis of the present that necessitates research into the early Renaissance as a means to mobilize a different understanding of today.26 By contrast, what I call a dialectical contemporary seeks to navigate multiple temporalities within a more political horizon. Rather than simply claim that many or all times are present in each historical object, we need to ask why certain temporalities appear in particular works of art at specific historical moments. Furthermore, this analysis is motivated by a desire to understand our present condition and how to change it. Lest this method be interpreted as yet another form of presentism, a preoccupation with the now masquerading as historical inquiry, it should be stressed that sightlines are always focused on the future: the ultimate aim is to disrupt the relativist pluralism of the current moment, in which all styles and beliefs are considered equally valid, and to move towards a more sharply politicized understanding of where we can and should be heading. If, as Osborne claims, the global contemporary is a shared fiction, then this doesn’t denote its ‘impossibility’, but rather provides the basis for a new political imaginary. 

︎︎︎Giorgio Agamben, David Kishik, and Stefan Pedatella, "What Is an Apparatus?" and Other Essays (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2020) http://arthistoryrome.uniroma2.it/images/Agamben-copia.pdf   

︎︎︎Alexander Nagel and Christopher S. Wood, Anachronic Renaissance (New York: Zone Books, 2010).